9 Strategies For Marketing Your Nutrition Business

If you’re looking to get your name out there as a nutritionist, you need to start marketing your nutrition business properly. In this article, we’ll discuss the 9 most effective strategies that you can implement. 

If you're looking to stand out from the crowd, an effective tactic is to expand the services you offer. Through the completion of a Personal Training Diploma, you will be able to create bespoke workout programmes that help to facilitate a client's goals. 

More information about this qualification is available in our downloadable course prospectus.

9 Marketing Ideas For A Nutritionist

#1 - Use Paid Social Media Advertisements as Means of Nutritionist Marketing

Paid social media advertisements are a hugely popular way to get your name out there, they are a budget friendly way to maximise your chances of attracting the attention of your target market. 

So how do you set this up? First, you will need a business account. Start by setting up a personal account on Instagram or Facebook, in this instance we will take you through the process of setting up Meta ads on Instagram. 

You can see below, from left to right an example of how to set up an advert through a business account on Instagram. 

As you can see, you’re able to set a goal for your advert, whether it be to increase traffic to your website or Instagram page or for more direct messages. 

One of the best things about social media advertising is that you can be super specific about your audience. You can see that you can define your audience automatically, which means that Instagram will use your current followers to make an educated assumption on the demographics of who should view your advertisement.  

You’re able to choose what kind of things that you want to specify in terms of audience, including factors such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Location

You can decide the exact metrics of these things with what is probably the most important and relevant tool - the ‘create your own audience’ feature. It is recommended that you use this since you can specifically target the market that you want.

If you choose this option you’ll see a screen like this below which allows you to specify the location of the people who you want to see the ad:

As you can see, all you need to do is slide the bar from your current location to adjust and it will show you the radius in which your ad can be seen across.

This is a great way to ensure that you’re getting local people if you're in a nutritionist office setting. However, you can still have this radius much larger if you decide to take your services online too since you won’t be tied down to one location.

Within this advert, you should ensure you have a call to action. This is something that takes users to another page, like to click on your advert and enquire about your nutrition coaching services.

So that you can see what this looks like in action, below you can see an example of a Meta advertisement for a nutritionist:

The CTA for this is the 'Learn more' button which is a link to their website, where users can find out more and enquire about their weight loss course.

You should always have a relevant call to action, whether it is to your website landing page, social profile or an enquiry page - use the most actionable link.

Remember, all of these things are under Meta, this means that you need to also build a Facebook business page and connect the two together. You can then run Facebook ads as well as Instagram adverts and assess which ones work best for you by tracking the insights of both. 

Ensure you run both for the same amount of time and make the testing fair on both ad campaigns. This will help you understand what kind of market you should focus more on, either Instagram or Facebook.

The set up for Facebook works very similarly, you can find an extensive guide that we have on setting up Facebook ads here if you want to take this step first instead of Instagram advertisements. 

#2  Google Ads are Among the Most Prominent Marketing Ideas for a Nutritionist

Google Ads are used in every kind of industry, they are a proven way to pay to get relevant traffic (your target audience) on your website where they can then enquire or sign up for your services. 

Most importantly, Google Ads have a great ROI (return on investment). So, where to start? 

First, start off by choosing the keyword or ‘search term’ that you want your website to rank for. Your chosen keyword or search term should reflect the kind of phrase your potential clients are searching when looking for a business like yours. 

Some examples might include:

• Nutritionist in *insert location*
• Nutrition coach for *specific audience*
• Nutritionist near me

Once you’ve decided on a keyword, say you want your website to come up on the first page of Google when somebody searches the term, ‘sports nutritionist near me’, the next step is to check out the costs.

Tools like AHrefs or Google Ads themself can help you determine an approximate cost per click (CPC) for every keyword. This CPC is the amount that you will pay every time a potential client clicks on your Google Ad to navigate to your website. 

This example search term has the following ‘top of the page bid’ according to Google Ads planner:

As you can see, the average price that advertisers pay ranges from £0.33 - £1.20 per click. This is roughly how much you will need to pay if somebody clicks your Google Ad.

One of the most appealing things about Google Ads and their CPC model is that you only pay when somebody clicks your link. If a user scrolls past your link, it doesn't cost you a penny.

Google advertising has clear positive impacts on businesses. Below, you can see the efficacy of Google Ads by the figures of what the approximate conversion rate is for those who utilise it:

The same research shows that the average conversion rate for Google Ads is up to 6% across all devices! This tells us that when people are clicking on Google Ads for specific terms like ‘nutritionist near me’, they have high intent, and are likely to become a customer or client.

This conversion rate is much higher than those of non-paid results and Google, mainly because paid Ads get the best spots - they’re situated at the top of the page. Here’s an example:

As you can see, they are sitting at the top of the page and are thus much more likely to be clicked on first.

Reliable statistics show that the higher up in Google's results a website is (or the better they ‘rank’), the more clicks, conversions and traffic it receives. 

As shown in the graph below, the higher a webpage ranks, the higher its click through rate (CTR):

The CTR is determined by the amount of times your advert is clicked, divided by the amount of times that it is seen.

As you can see, there is a huge difference from the first ranking result to the webpage sitting at the number 10 spot, as well as the significant drop from the first to the second ranking website, showing that the higher up you can pay to be in the results, the more website clicks you can get. 

This is why Google Ads are so effective, users are generally impatient and want an answer to their question fast. Business owners know this which is why they pay and compete for the top spot. 

Aside from how high up your website is on Google's search results page, you should consider other ways to get people to click your link. For example, by offering some sort of incentive.

A good example is to offer something of value to the user within the meta description. As you can see below, nutritionist J Clarke has done exactly this:

As you can see, there is a clear incentive for the end user - a code offering 20% off. 

Including this in the meta description text means that it is visible on the results page, and can therefore attract users to click on this specific link compared to the others that don’t have this kind of leverage.

So now that you know why it is a reliable marketing tool and brings real results, where do you start? Head over to the Google Ads home page first off and browse the site, to find out more information.

There are tons of resources on their site where you can find everything you need, you can even speak to an expert to see how you can get started especially if you have concerns about affordability. Google may have some helpful offers too so it is worth checking consistently, for example as of December ‘22 Google was offering this following deal:

This means you’re getting double the amount of credit for your investment, this will help you feel the benefits of Google Ads more - the bigger the investment the better since you’re able to run your campaign longer and increase your chances to outbid any potential competitors.

It is a serious investment, particularly if you’re creating a pricey campaign so ensure you do plenty of research beforehand. Nonetheless, it is a surefire way to professionalise your business and to start seeing some serious ROI.

#3 - Utilise Google Business for A Free Marketing Strategy

If you want to know how to market a nutrition business for free, GoogleMyBusiness is a great tool to utilise.

GooglemyBusiness is a tool that you will have likely used before. It allows you to create a listing for your business. This listing consists of vital information about your business.

This information is then easily accessible to users searching for a business like yours in your specific location. 

Here’s a screenshot of what these listings include and what they look like for users searching ‘nutritionists in london’:

As you can see, GMB allows you to upload and list your business with all the relevant information on there. This helps any interested users get in touch and find out more without having to put any effort into it at all.

There are some things however that are out of your control when it comes to GMB, like reviews. Reviews are the most important thing in relation to marketing your business on GMB since it can be a great way to legitimise your business and draw in potential clients, they also help you build up a star value on GMB. 

You can see on the aforementioned example, we have highlighted the average star rating. This star rating is pulled from reviews so it is a good idea to try to encourage your clients to leave honest reviews.

This allows your clients to do the marketing for you, it is transparency which is what people want to see when hiring a nutritionist's capabilities. 

Aside from that you have the basics like:

• Opening hours
• Contact number
• Your address.

Your address section is directly linked to the local intent, this is the map that you can see on the example, the red pinpoints are all businesses so you can see their exact location.

This works alongside the local 3 pack, which is a term used for the top 3 results that are localised for the most relevant results to the end user. This is why it is so important to have a listing so that you can optimise it and reach the more local end users thus, the higher the chance you have of actually making conversions.

Always keep in mind your end goal, you want to make sure that your marketing business is easy to find, accessible and that people don’t have to work hard to find answers. GMB is how to market yourself as a nutritionist smarter, rather than harder!

#4 - Optimise Your Website for SEO

Having a nutritionist website is vital, you need to have a hub for potential clients to find the services that you offer and find out who you are. 

Ultimately, your website is a place where you can show your worthiness as a professional and encourage visitors to enquire about your services. That said, it is no use having all of this information on a website that nobody can find. 

This is where SEO (search engine optimization) comes in. The key attraction of using SEO compared to the aforementioned PPC Google Ads (discussed in Step 2) is that SEO enriched traffic is organic. 

This means that you’re not paying for your place among the top ten results on the SERP (search engine results page).

Instead, you’re gaining your spot there because you have met the requirements of Google’s ranking factors and your site has been deemed relevant for the target keyword search. Organic results appear like this, just below any paid ad spots:

With that in mind, where do you start to optimise your site?

First, pick your keyword, if you don’t have too much of an investment fund, avoid using an overly competitive keyword. In order to find out if it is competitive or not, use tools like AHrefs. 

AHrefs will give you insights into how difficult it is to reach the top ranking websites on the Google search results page. It will look like this:

You can see that the generic term of nutritionist in London has a ‘hard’ difficulty when it comes to ranking in the top 10 websites. 

You should typically go for keywords that are less difficult but still include your target keyword or phrase. You could do this by including reference to a more specific location or particular niche. For example, you could try ‘Nutritionist in hackney’.

Narrowing down the search with more specific search terms will allow you to find less competitive keywords which will be easier to rank for, making it easier for potential clients to find you.  

For example, take a look at this keyword below: 

As you can see, the keyword difficulty has dropped dramatically. This means that it is easier to rank for this keyword and therefore is a good place to start should you only just be starting out with SEO.

So that you can see what it takes to rank organically, here is a short analysis of a nutritionist that has managed to rank 4th organically through SEO best practices for the aforementioned keyword.

As you can see, this nutritionist has ranked on Google organically.

Including their target keyword within their link title and meta description, as highlighted below, is one of the main factors helping this nutritionist rank well: 

Ensure that you’re including your target keywords within the first sentence of your meta description and the title itself, at a minimum.

Keywords also need to be included within the pages themselves. Good SEO is all about finding the balance between including plenty of keywords while being cautious to not jam the keywords and overuse them, as this can be a detriment to the success of your SEO.

Aside from keywords, you need to ensure you are uploading not just valuable text, but also valuable imagery. Visitors to your site are likely to be deterred from difficult-to-digest chunks of text. So, it is important that you break up your content with  relevant images and video content where possible.

For example, the site we have referenced does this well, as you can see:

The reason you should aim for page breaks like this is to increase dwell time while reducing bounce rate. Here is a brief breakdown of what these ranking factors mean:

• Dwell time: The amount of time spent on the page the user has clicked on.
• Bounce rate: The amount of people who leave your page right away without continuing throughout the site.

If you work on these factors, among others, it is going to help you to increase your chances of crawling to the top of the SERP. You should do some extensive research into SEO, because there are huge amounts of information to take in but, here are some ranking factors to be aware of:

• Relevance of content: How relevant your sales pages and over content of your site to the users keyword.
• Quality of content: If you have high quality content, other sites will link to your site (backlinks), this tells Google that your content is of high quality.
• Useability: This relates to how your site is navigated, including factors such as if your site is mobile friendly. 

Keep up to date with how Google decides which ranking factor accounts for the most value, as time goes on it would not be surprising if this changes with the development of technology and the way people utilise websites for finding services, like nutritionists.

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For some more helpful resources on running your business as a nutritionist, head over to these articles below:

• How To Become A Nutritionist Online 
• A Complete Guide To Nutrition Coach Hashtags & How To Use Them 
• 17 Best Nutrition Software for Professionals (2022) 

#5 - Use a Referral Scheme within your Nutrition Marketing Plan

In order to run a referral program you should focus on what your incentive is going to be.

Though you may have some clients that will naturally refer you by word of mouth, you can push for these referrals more by incentivising them. By doing this, you can ensure that you’re only distributing offers when it is definitely going to benefit your business. 

Just take a quick look at what this research showed in regard to conversion and the general success of referrals:

It is a safety net beneath any investments or discounts, so how can you ensure this is among your nutrition marketing strategies? Begin by making a decision on what you’re going to use as your incentive - some examples may include the following for both the referral and the referer:

• A free first session
• Free consultation
• Percentage off a monthly package
• Cash back offer

The point is, the incentive has to be worthy enough of people actually pursuing the referral in the first place. Not only that, but you should aim to benefit both parties, whether they both get the same reward or different ones is up to you as the business owner.

This is done in all industries, since it is often a fool-proof way of gaining more clients and making current customers / clients happier all the while. You can see below an example of a nutrition company that runs a ‘refer a friend’ program:

As you can see, this company uses two different offers for both parties, so they don’t always have to be the same in order to be effective. In fact, it wouldn’t be unusual to see the referrer getting the ‘better’ incentive since you’re practically thanking them for being a loyal client too.

The whole process is pretty simple and straightforward, do some self assessment and find out what your most popular services are as these may be the more valuable incentives to offer. 

This can help you to get more clients on board since you’ll be putting your best foot forward and showing what you do best.

#6 - How to Grow your Nutrition Practice with Marketing Printed Materials

Even in an era dominated by digital marketing, you can still take advantage of printed materials and the benefits that come along with them. Printed marketing materials include the likes of:

• Business cards
• Leaflets
• Billboards (should you have the budget)
• Brochures
• Stickers
• Posters
• Window displays

As a nutritionist, there are tons of relevant places that you can put these types of printed materials, so before we tell you about how you can create these materials, here are some of the relevant places that you can actually distribute them.

• Private / commercial gyms
• GP offices 
• Community centres
• Relevant clubs - e.g: local Slimming World clubs
• Local sport clubs - eg: Football clubs 

If you’re working specifically as a sports nutritionist, you might want to focus on places like gyms and sports clubs since this is the audience that you’ll be hoping to attract. That being said, either make your printed material advertising your holistic services as a nutritionist or create separate materials that are tailored for each place of distribution.

For example, lean more towards your nutritionist skills in relation to particular sports in the likes of gyms or sporting clubs; you can also tailor some other printed material to focus on heart health on the printed materials that you want to distribute to GP’s or community centres where the general population of these places are at an older age bracket.

So, once you know what you want to actually create and distribute, how do you do this with no experience in marketing your nutrition business? 

One of the most popular print marketing materials are business cards, we have an extensive guide on creating nutritionist business cards here for you to follow if you’re ready for a small investment to start using print materials.

Aside from business cards, there are some things that would also act as a small investment but still pull in results. Things like posters and stickers with your logo on can be made for free on the likes of Canva, so you would only be paying a small price for the actual print and delivery service.

Canva is incredibly easy to use, since it was made for people who have no experience in graphic designing. That in mind, you can see below the huge array of templates that are available for print marking materials:

It has never been easier to make professional looking materials when marketing your nutrition business and what is so useful with the likes of Canva is that it is totally free to use so have a play around with features and templates and start building your branding and marketing materials.

#7 - Organic Content & UGC On Social Media is How to Market a Nutrition Business on a Budget

Social media marketing is only getting stronger, with fitness instagram accounts earning huge amounts of money for a single post. 

So, while it might not be your goal to earn a living from posting on social media, this demonstrates what kind of scale you can market on social media. We mentioned earlier about how organic traffic is so valuable when it comes to SEO, but the same goes for social media too. 

Aside from paid advertising, you can gain huge attraction from organic traffic that you have built from posting informative and enticing posts. Engagement is huge, you need to be utilising the free tools that you have and social media is one of them, with hard work you can make money and generate clients with a good social media presence behind you.

You can build up a healthy running page by starting off with a regular posting schedule by using softwares like Sproutsocial, while also taking care in how you present your page.

Keep in mind that your goal is marketing your nutrition business so you should be trying to strike a balance between keeping your social media personal to an extent so people are able to see the face behind the business, while still promoting your nutrition business.

You can do this with the 80/20 approach that is popular among businesses on social media. This essentially means that you should keep only 20% of your content promotional, while the rest should focus on creating value so your followers stick around.

This will help you to build a reliable brand and in turn, boost your legitimacy as a business and bring more opportunity for interaction. Once you start to gain this interaction level, you can use this to your advantage by utilising user generated content (UGC) to promote your services and brand. 

UGC really pushes your authenticity and sets you apart from the rest, it includes general posts such as photos, videos etc but in relation to nutritionists, one of the most valuable types of UGC are testimonials.

For example, take a look at this nutritionist that does this well:

As you can see, this isn’t overly promotional, yet it does still celebrate the success of their services through praising this client. 

The bottom line is, you should limit your promotional efforts and let the quality of your work do the promotion for you. You can ask client permission to share testimonials and celebrate their accomplishments, this again legitimises your businesses and boasts authenticity. 

All of these positive contributions to your social media all feed into your nutritionist marketing plan and help to turn interested users into paying clientele.

#8 - How to Market Yourself as a Nutritionist for the Masses With Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to keep the relationship between you and your mailing list consistent. It is a reminder that you’re always there and can take a specific route to either retaining clients, generating new ones or pushing for referrals. 

However, before you begin constructing your strategy, you need to first gather your contacts. You can do this through general lead magnets and prompts on your website, like this nutritionist does:

This kind of prompt in this example is known as an exit intent pop-up. It appears when the user heads toward the exit button. This can be super helpful, but you may find it more useful if you incentivise it. 

For example, if you exchange a nutrition plan example or recipies for their email address or a percentage off code. It is unlikely that people will want to sign up for no reason, so give them a reason!

You should then start by deciding a goal for your email marketing plan. The useful thing about email marketing campaigns is that you don’t need just one goal, and the goals that you do have can even change track along the journey that an email campaign takes.

For example, if your goal is to make a sale, you would create a campaign that has this end goal. This doesn’t mean that you dive right into a promotional email and then be done with it, it is a journey. 

This ‘journey’ is often compressed into 5 steps, you may find other variations of these steps but these are a good starting point to make it clear:

1. Acquisition: You have gained the email address from some sort of lead magnet that has enticed the end user, so you should send a series of short but useful welcome emails to introduce your nutrition business.
2. Consideration: This is when a user turns into a possible client, they could be following a link from a previous email browsing your nutrition packages but abandoning the page soon after. This helps you to know which users to nurture and attempt to convert into clients.
3. Purchase: If a client decides to invest into your nutrition services, you should then send your thank you emails and keep them up to date on what is going to come next. Keep them in the loop and don’t abandon them after they have purchased.
4. Retention: Keep your paying clientele around by using retention strategies. This might include things like special offers or personalised emails like birthday wishes, keep the relationship active ready to re-engage and make further sales or referrals.
5. Re-engagement: Re-engagement is incredibly important, particularly if you're noticing inactive users. This might be people who don’t open your emails anymore or those who haven't taken any action for a long time. 

You may be wondering how you can notice this sort of thing, but this is what email marketing automation is for. 

Popular softwares includes the likes of MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, these provide an affordable route to start email campaigns, even for small businesses. 

For example take a look at the pricing brackets for MailChimp subscriptions and the affordability prospects depending on what you want from the software and how many contacts that you want / need:

As you can see, there is even the opportunity to utilise email marketing for free, perfect if you’re just getting used to it or are new to marketing all together. We have an extensive guide on creating your email campaign strategy here, so ensure you take yourself through that for some in depth help in starting up a campaign.

Whatever your journey consists of, practise it. Do some test runs on family and friends’ email addresses and check everything is running smoothly, this will help ensure that your emails aren’t falling into your contacts spam folders or any graphics / images aren't loading correctly.

You don’t want badly constructed email campaigns going out without you even being aware so, test and then send out and begin your campaigns.

#9 - Content Marketing is Popular way How to Market Yourself as a Nutritionist

Finally, one more way to get your nutrition business out there is to create a nutrition blog within your webpage. This can draw in traffic to your website, direct readers to your sales pages and has the potential to convert readers into paying clients.

This links directly to SEO which we already went into detail about so we will keep this final tip brief, but it is still important to know how blogs in particular can benefit you aside from sales pages.  

When it comes to content, you can base your articles around the keywords that you have researched and answer any questions that people have about nutrition. 

This establishes your authority in the industry and can help to build a strong brand that has legitimacy behind it. 

If you have a strong website that is being consistently updated with new, fresh SEO enriched content, the strength of your website grows thus, helping you to rank higher.

If you’re offering nutrition services, of course you should be writing about nutrition; it should be useful, informative and always create value so that you become a trusted source. For example, look how this nutritionist has a blog on their website and writes about relative subjects:

You can see how it is a part of their site and once you click into it, you can find a navigation bar so you can browse relevant subjects and take a look at their writing:

Blogs like this can start to gain huge amounts of attraction and you can go on to guest post and generate backlinks, improving the stability and quality of your website. 

Content marketing doesn’t just give you the opportunity to communicate with your target audience, but it allows you to network within the industry as well. 

Things like a guest on your blog can help you to establish some authority in the industry. For example, if you are able to interview popular fitness professionals you can drive more traffic to your site and gain some recognition from new audiences. 

The USP of content marketing though is that it is pretty much free. Yes, it will certainly take some time investment and lots of research to ensure you’re only putting out factually correct and informative pieces, but financials wise - it’s a win.

This is why it is one of the best places to start when marketing your nutrition business, it can take some practice to gain a steady stream of content that is actually valuable, but there is the potential for your blog to grow into a business of its own where in you can generate money and attraction for writing about what you’re passionate about - nutrition. 

Before You Go…

We hope that you feel ready to take on the challenge of marketing your own business, begin with these 9 strategies and we are sure that you will see results and will bring in all the clients you want. 

Don't forget, that earning additional qualifications is a highly effective way of marketing yourself to a new demographic. For example, following the completion of a personal training diploma, you will be able to attract clients who want bespoke workout programmes. 

Find out more about how this qualification can benefit your career in our downloadable course prospectus here.